Following the collapse of Jaysh al-Islam’s rule in Douma, Yassin al-Haj Saleh traveled to Turkey to seek answers from the city’s displaced residents about his wife, Samira, and three other activists abducted with her there in 2013.
Despite the enormous professional and personal price she paid for it—including arrest by Assad’s infamous security agencies—the celebrated 49-year-old actress never wavered in her support for Syria’s revolutionaries.
For over 100,000 civilians expelled from Eastern Ghouta, their new homes in official shelters bear striking resemblance to the regime’s fearsome detention centers.
Russia, Iran, and Turkey have now clearly delineated their zones of control in northern Syria, and are looking next to re-open the international highway extending from Turkey to Jordan.
In the second of four articles written during the forced displacement of Eastern Ghouta’s residents, our reporter looks at the local efforts to house almost 50,000 new arrivals in the country’s already-saturated northern provinces, often relying entirely on private funds, donations, and coordination.
From colonial France’s bombing of Syria in the 1920s to Assad’s massacres today, international law has always been stacked against non-state actors, protecting even the bloodiest regimes and denying their victims justice.
Russia hints it will press Iran to leave Syria, in line with recently renewed Israeli and American demands. But serious doubts remain as to whether a forced Iranian withdrawal is even possible, let alone likely.
Al-Jumhuriya talks to journalist Gareth Browne about his week in Syria last month observing a “crazy club” of pro-Assad British parliamentarians and priests.
Having expelled whole communities en masse from numerous Syrian cities and towns, a new law now allows the Assad regime to confiscate their properties, rendering their displacement permanent and radically transforming the country’s demography.
From besieged Douma, the last remaining pocket of opposition-held Eastern Ghouta, Osama Nassar reflects on the fate awaiting him and his fellow residents as Russia and the Assad regime impose their “settlement” on the region’s starved and battered population.
A former political prisoner now living in besieged Ghouta reflects on the parallels between the two experiences.
Displaced Damascenes fear “reconstruction” is a fig leaf for the permanent transformation of their former home neighborhoods—and their exclusion therefrom.
